With a grunt of frustration, she changed into leggings and a T-shirt and got on with the work that Terry had abandoned. There was only so much Molly was going to have time to do. Ironing would have to wait. She shoved the overflowing wicker basket into the utility room. There were such things as laundry services; she’d have to investigate.

With the vacuuming done, she ran a duster around, plumped up cushions, reorganised chairs.

An hour later, she stood and looked around with satisfaction. The stage was set.

3

‘You mean you fired her?’ Jack said later that evening, as Molly raced around doing the last-minute titivating while he busied himself putting the food, that had been delivered an hour earlier, onto fine china platters. It wasn’t complicated and despite his eating far more of them than he should, she left him to it.

‘She was smoking,’ Molly said, ‘anyway, she was never very good and a million times worse since she took over the laundry. We’ll get someone better.’ She didn’t tell him how difficult that might be, how getting someone, even someone as unreliable as Terry, might be impossible. If it came to it, they’d have to do some work themselves. She was using the royal we, but she knew Jack wouldn’t lift a finger, he never had and was unlikely to start now. At the back of her head was the thought of ringing Terry and begging her to return, then the clear memory of the cigarette floating in the coffee dregs came back to make Molly shudder. No, she’d not ask her to come back. Something else would come up. Maybe one of her friends would have someone they could recommend.

With a last look around the room, she turned back to Jack who was carefully arranging prawn hors d’oeuvre around the edges of a square dish. ‘They’ll need to go in the fridge for the moment,’ she warned him. She took one, popped it into her mouth and smiled to see his irritation at the upset to the pattern he’d painstakingly made.

He rearranged the display and put the dish into the fridge. When he’d shut the door carefully and turned around, there was a bottle of beer in one hand. ‘A reward for all my hard work,’ he said, reaching into a drawer for an opener and immediately slurping the foamy beer from the neck of the bottle.

Molly swallowed the criticism she wanted to make – that it was early to start drinking – and there was a time she wouldn’t have hesitated in saying something, but his temper seemed so much more volatile recently and he took umbrage at little things that would once have rolled off his back or made him laugh.